When you under promise over deliver, you manage expectations. When you surprise on the upside is when people start to connect the dots and brand you as “dependable” and someone to be trusted. Meeting expectations is what the average person does and will not propel them to the top anytime soon.
The worst thing that you can do is to promise to complete a task but then you don’t follow through with the promise. Businesses have gone bankrupt and under by overpromising and underdelivering on the results of their product. It’s the consumer’s expectations that matter more than what the actual product does.
If you promise your product cures cancer 100% yet only eliminates 99% of the cancer, the consumer is still going to be disappointed. They’re going to lose trust in your words and your words start to mean less and less going forward. Even if a 99% reduction of cancer is a monstrous result, it’s still not in line with your promise.
The same goes for anything else in life, it doesn’t just have to be in business. When you manage expectations on Valentine’s Day and let your significant other think the holiday doesn’t matter to you, is when you have the upper hand. Then you show up in nice clothing, flowers, dinner reservation, and the whole nine yards.
Then the disappointment turns into exuberant euphoria. He or she will be the happiest they’ll ever be. This is how powerful managing expectations are. Even if you were going to plan the exact same thing, one outcome is just happiness while the other outcome is exuberance.
The expectation is just as important, if not more important, as the actual results. Under promise and over deliver.
What is Under Promise Over Deliver?
Underpromising and overdelivering means that you communicate in ways that downplays what you will actually deliver by the end. It’s a strategy for managing the relationship you have with other person, whether it be a customer relationship, significant other relationship, your boss, and the like.
It’s a very good strategy that works. One of the prior CFOs I worked for talked about how he’s a “under promise over deliver” kind of guy. Ever since then is when I started using that strategy and it works. The more positive the spread between expectations and results, the better relationship you will have.
You don’t tell your boss that you’ll get it done in 1 day if you know deep down that you can only get it done in 3 days. That ruins the relationship and not only that, it ruins your word. Your words start to erode and have less meaning over time. Especially if you continue to do it and let people down.
What you do is you tell your boss you can get it done within 4 or 5 days. Then you get it finished within 3 days and surprise your boss on the upside. Not only that, if the quality is even better than he imagined, you are doing well. You delivered a quality work product even faster than he expected it to be finished.
When you successfully under promise over deliver, people don’t forget it. Why? You gave them a good surprise. When you emotionally make someone feel something, good or bad, people don’t forget it. That goes for both men and women. They may not remember the exact details on how they felt so good.
But they sure will remember how you made them feel and instantly associate good or bad with you. Rightly or wrongly.
Why You Should Under Promise and Over Deliver
You can easily find why you should under promise and over deliver by SMACKING that social share button and posting to your favorite social media! Your friends could use this valuable strategy in their lives to be successful.
In seriousness, below are the concrete reasons why you should use this strategy. It’s helped me in my career and make six figures by the ripe age of 23.
1) Manage Expectations
Expectations are what matters in your reputation and getting someone to associate you with a certain brand. It’s the neurological connections within someone’s brain that connects when you make them feel good or bad. Underpromising and overdelivering helps cement that scattered connection.
When that connection is cemented is when your brand is cemented. That’s the moment that you form your reputation. Not when you find out later when people talk about you. Not when you think you managed your brand well. But when that neurological connection forms in others’ brain.
It’s when people say the words that they finally “get” something. It’s when connections happen within the brain that cements their understanding or the world that matters. Cement that with positive associations around your brand, don’t cement it by doing a bad thing like over promising and under delivering.
2) Less Pressure on You
When you have less pressure and more time to make decisions, you make better decisions. Poker players know this. The ones who ask for a time clock against their opponent are almost always bluffers. Bluffers know that the less time and more pressure someone has, the worse their decision making process is.
When you under promise over deliver, there’s less pressure on you to deliver the best product you can possibly deliver. You already set very low expectations and any result that’s significantly better than those low expectations is positioning you for success. Reflect back and ask what your best decisions in life were.
Some were a spontaneous, “heat of the moment” decisions you made. But the majority of it are the ones where you took the time to figure out the pros and cons of the decisions. You thought things through and evaluated what life would be like in those shoes. That’s the benefit you get by underpromising and overdelivering.
3) Surprise on the Upside
This is an overlooked psychological strategy. If you get someone to expect $5 from you and you get them $6, it’s a good result. However, it’s significantly worse than if you get them to expect $3 from you and you get them $5. Even if the absolute dollar amount is higher in the first scenario.
The higher and better the surprise on the upside is, the better you are doing. I once had a company use this trick against me. They wouldn’t tell me what the bonus would be as a part of the job offer. Then they tried to sell the idea that “once bonus season comes around, we hope you will be pleasantly surprised”.
Turns out, that was total baloney and I would have been absolutely livid if I had joined the company. The bonus that I was getting with my current company was 3x what they were going to give as a bonus. I would not have been pleasantly surprised, I would have been absolutely angry. I’m glad I rejected that offer.
4) Your Promises Have More Meaning
When you under promise and over deliver, your words have actual dependable meaning. People start trusting your word because they know you mean it. These days, my, “I think I can do it in 3 days” means I’ll finish in 2 days. My, “I know I can do it in 3 days” means unless aliens attack the Earth, I will finish at the very least in 3 days.
I created trust within my words by communicating that I’m not just saying it. I actually mean what I say and I say what I mean. This eliminates potential confusion and my bosses have relied and depended on my promises to get the job done. It’s a strategy that’s worked well, is working, and I know will work in the future.
You don’t want your words to just be words, you want your words to mean something. Your credibility and reputation matters more than you know in this world. It was a harsh reality when I realized that you truly can’t get to success on your own. Other people HAVE to help you. Therefore, create goodwill within them so that it’s a good relationship.
Why You Shouldn’t Under Promise and Over Deliver
Now, under promise over deliver strategy isn’t all sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns. There’s actual downsides to the strategy that can’t be ignored. You have to take it into consideration. Otherwise you may use it in situations that are inappropriate and it may actually end up backfiring and hurting your chances.
One of the biggest caveats to this is when you under promise so much that they won’t even consider or give you a chance. One of the companies I interviewed with started the salary negotiation with “our budget is $85 – $95k, is that OK?” I immediately knew then and there that the salary will not work out and knew I would reject the offer.
Which I did after calculating the job worth. When you under promise so much to the point where others don’t want to give you a chance, then you shouldn’t under promise and over deliver. Because then, someone else who may have used the strategy but promised a higher starting point will beat you out for the job or the project.
You still need a chance in the first place. It takes going through numerous failures and successes to know which underpromising action is more appropriate. Therefore, the decision to do either will completely have to be within you. I will admit I faced numerous failures with these strategy myself.
During interviews is when I failed at it. When I interviewed for a Corporate Development job, I underpromised by telling them I haven’t done financial modeling as a job before. True? Yes. However, I know the basics of it. The damage was already done though.
They didn’t move forward with the next round to even test me with a financial modeling test. It’s an art to figure out which is appropriate.
A Better Strategy than Under Promise and Over Deliver?
Under promise and over deliver is not the best strategy. The actual best strategy is to overpromise and overdeliver. You eliminate any potential for the person to reject you because you underpromised too much. Then you still surprise on the upside because you overdelivered on your promise.
However, this is the hardest strategy to pull off. You have to be great at working under pressure all the while knowing that you promised at the higher point of your capability and knowing that you have to exceed even that. This is for projects that you already know that you can do so you know there won’t be hiccups.
Google is one example who perfectly executes this strategy. When you want to search and ask something, Google almost instantly gives you a response. Not just any response, but the right response. Not just the right response, but sometimes hundreds of millions of relevant results to your query.
However, it took Google over 2 decades to get to that point. These days, they are so good at what they do that they deliver results like clockwork, it doesn’t matter to them. Therefore, if you already feel or know that you are at this point, then overpromising and overdelivering is the right path to take.
However, understand yourself very well. This is the hardest strategy ever to pull off and it is not for the novice to pull off. Once you do pull it off, the whole world opens up to you and they will go to you for advice and help. That’s when opportunities come to you instead of the other way around.
Under Promise and Over Deliver Strategy is Great
Now that you know the two strategies to manage expectations and delivery of results, try it out for yourself. Try either the under promise and over deliver strategy or over promise and over deliver strategy and see which one works better for you. There’s not a one size fits all and one may be better than the other in some situations.
In general, underpromising and overdelivering is a better strategy for the general population out there. I will continue to employ this strategy. Remember that Jeff Bezos told early investors that Amazon had a “70% chance” of failing or go bankrupt. I bet you those early investors are quite happy with what Jeff Bezos created.
When I ever start a company, I will always tell the potential investors that there’s a greater chance that I’ll fail than I would succeed. That will hurt my chances of actually getting an investment in the first place, absolutely. However, the ones who does stick with me afterwards I know I will have loyalty to me.
I see too many people, generally the younger folks though not always, let ego get the better of them. Pride is the enemy of success and when you think that you can’t complete something, it’s time to actually go out and say it. Otherwise, it creates a lose-lose situation where no one is happy by the end of it all.
You want other people to continue to stick by your side and help you throughout. Not be resentful and remember the one time that you failed and have them brand you with that single failure for the rest of your life. Rightly or wrongly, some people actually do something like this.
We can easily avoid the situation through underpromise and over deliver strategy..
Sometimes Google is so good at what they do, they would show me what I want to see, before I even search it.
I’ll be talking with my wife about buying a vacuum cleaner, and then I’ll see a Dyson ad on my phone. Like how did it know? haha.
It certainly feels like Google knows you better than you know yourself at times.